“You catch that?” said Acer to the fuming Josh Berman. “She just admitted, in so many words, that she’s seen your brother’s dick.”
Enough with the dick, I said. Enough with the dick.
“What up, dog,” Blake said to me. “I didn’t even see you there.”
Enough with the dick.
“You the man,” Acer said.
Get bent, I told him.
Ruth reached her hand out and put it on my shoulder. It was nice of her to do that. It calmed me a little, though I felt even worse for having pictured her getting dick-shook at. She said to Acer, “Josh has seen his brother’s unit too, Blake, is I guess what I was getting at, and since size is relative, and oneself what one relates to, and since Josh seems to genuinely believe that his brother’s other than tiny, it doesn’t take much of a leap to conclude that, well, you know…”
Good, I thought. Yes. Berman’s got the tinywang. Way too tiny to shake at a girl. He wouldn’t even whip it out. If she saw it he’d be… I felt like a bancer. I knew what it was you did with your wang when you had a girlfriend and she would let you; I wasn’t two years old; I read a lot of books. I knew that you didn’t just shake it at girls, but if what you did with it was what Berman did with it with June… As bad as it was to picture him shaking it at her, that wasn’t as bad as what he really would have done, if he’d done anything that she would’ve let him, so I pictured him shaking it and felt like a bancer. Everything seemed gross. I wanted to hide. I was hiding.
“Just keep talking,” Berman said to Ruth. “Keep on talking. No one here’s listening. You’re not even in the room.”
“You heard the question about the blankspot for Jesus, though, right?”
“That’s not what it is at all!” said Berman.
“Who are you getting angry at? I’m not even here.”
“It. Means. Nothing. A blankspot is blank. Blank means nothing.”
“But if I’m not here, then who’re you trying to convince?”
“Aren’t you supposed to be objective? Aren’t you supposed to be a reporter? Is it my fault you’re flatter than a wall? Is it my fault Matt met another girl at Stevenson? Yes and yes and no and no, so listen to me: It’s meaningless. The blankspot is meaningless.”
“Well, not totally meaningless — it’s Frungeon’s,” said Acer. “The white stripe of Frungeon, Frungeon’s own nothing, the innermost symbol of his soul.”
“Exactly,” said Berman. “It’s got nothing to do with Jesus at all.”
“But it’s the innermost symbol of Frungeon’s Christian soul?”
“Fuck. You. Ruth. Rothstein,” said Berman, and grabbed his scarf and rushed out into Main Hall. One of the others grabbed his own scarf and turned.
“Cory,” Acer said to him.
“What?” the Shover called Cory said.
Acer hesitated.
Cory walked off to follow Josh Berman.
“Goldman!” Acer shouted. “Berman!” he shouted. “Don’t sweat it, you guys!”
And the other Shover added, “She’s just one of those kids who hates on the Shovers.”
Ruth said, “Drop the preposition and you’re onto something, fatso.”
That’s when Blake Acer tried to make friends with me. “That was sweet how you beat down those SpEds,” he told me.
You’re a cheesedick, I said.
“No, I didn’t mean… I meant in the locker-room…This morning’s what I meant… That Janitor SpEd and his friend with the smelly piss or whatever? Like the way you messed them up like that? I saw it with my own eyes and it was badass, man, those guys had it com—”
You’re a cheesedick, I told him.
“Oh, a cheesedick,” he said. Then he turned to the kid who Ruth had called a fatso. “Cheesedick,” he said. “Cheesedick, right?”
And each of them said “Cheesedick” and “Cheesedick, Tch.” = “We know how CageSpEds show affection with insults, we’ve heard them do it on the buses, and we can be down with it: cheesedick is a shibboleth we can all pronounce.”
I’m calling you a cheesedick, I said. You’re the both of you cheesedicks, and all of your friends. You’re smegmatic foreskins. Stinking, fungal, sebaceous fleshfolds.
“Smegma!” said Acer. “Fungal!” said the other one. “That’s funny!” they said, and they laughed it up loud, stealing glances to see if I was joining them yet. A couple seconds later, the laughter’d grown louder, like all laughter does when the laugher starts to force it. They no longer believed we’d soon laugh together, but they pretended they did to save face. It was the same move they’d pull when B-team bully Bryan “Bry Guy” Maholtz would grundy or push down a Shover in the hallway, the same laugh they incited the bandkids to laugh when they’d trip or wallslam or bookrocket a bandkid. It was textbook caulking, this laugh-along laugh, an offering of peace that = “We don’t want to fight you” while managing to ≠ “We don’t want to hurt you.”
In the middle of the laughter, Brodsky’s door opened, and then out came Miss Pinge, and Acer said her name. He showed her the scarf.
“Dashing,” she said, and sat down at her desk.
“Says it’s dashing,” said Acer to Fatso.
To me, Pinge said, “Your ears must be burning.” = “Brodsky’s been talking about you.” = “Brodsky’s got you made for the scoreboard.”
It took me a second to figure that out, though. My A was a little bit D’d.
Are the lobes very red? I said to Miss Pinge.
I disliked Berman, but that wasn’t it. Or that was partly it, but not all of it; the wangtalk and meanness to Jelly’s sister, the being June’s ex, the maybe having kissed her and the dickshaking imagery — it got me pissed, but none of that was what D’d my A. It was Cory, Berman’s friend. I’d disliked him on sight, as I had all the others, and that didn’t bother me — because he was a Shover, it didn’t bother me — but when Acer said his name and I found out it was Goldman, I liked him even less. That was what bothered me. I never liked, to start with, when I didn’t like an Israelite. Whenever I met one I didn’t like, instead of trying to find reasons why I might come to like him, I’d try to find reasons for why it was okay not to like him. I’d try to find a way to like not liking him, and I didn’t like that about me — it seemed weak.
“The lobes?” said Miss Pinge.
And suddenly I understood what she’d meant about burning ears, but Brodsky’s door was open and he might have been listening, so I kept up like I didn’t know what she’d meant. I approached her desk, asking, You got my record?
“I do,” she said, leaning forward a little.
Behind me, in his office, Brodsky coughed — fakely?
Can I have it? I said.
“I don’t know,” Miss Pinge said.
The Shovers packed up, went out to to the bus circle, Ruth taking down their statements on a stenopad.
You don’t know? I said.
“Maybe,” Miss Pinge said.
Brodsky coughed again, a string of — yes — of fakes, and a ball of muscle heated up between my shoulders, right where he aimed the beams of anger that shot from his eyes. He was definitely coughing to get my attention. It was not a good sign. I’d assumed that if he was going to question me about the scoreboard that day, then the note Eliyahu’d brought would’ve said for me to come down to the Office immediately, not when school let out. Except Brodsky probably knew I’d think that, and that’s probably why he did it the way he did it. It was a solid tactic and it was stupid of me to expect that showing up for my record would game him out.